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Photo Punch is a fun, whimsical app that lets you combine elements from and add effects to photos. It's nowhere near the most powerful photo-effects app on the market, but it is really good at a few specific functions.

Everything starts with a "Punch Shot," which is essentially a cut-out foreground element of a photo. You can cut out people, objects, and pretty much anything else from a photo, and save them to your Punch Shot folder, to be pasted onto a background at your convenience. This means you can do things like put yourself on a beach or place funny objects in your hand. The possibilities are endless. And once you're done, you can share your finished photos with other Photo Punch users, as well as on Facebook and Twitter.

To create a Punch Shot, just hit the Punch button, pick a photo (or take a new one), and start tracing around the object you want to cut out. The more accurate you are here, the better, as once you're done tracing, Photo Punch's autoselection feature will kick in and make adjustments to improve your selection. This is Photo Punch's biggest selling point.

While I was impressed by Photo Punch's autoselection feature, I did notice some of its weaknesses. As expected, it had particular difficulty tracing foreground items that closely matched (in color) their background. Also, I found the manual fine-tuning tools to be unpredictable and difficult to use. Still, even with these problems, I'm convinced that Photo Punch's magical autoselection did a lot better than I could have using just my finger and my touch screen.

Jaymar Cabebe covers mobile apps and Windows software for CNET. While he may be a former host of the Android Atlas Weekly podcast, he doesn't hate iOS or Mac. Jaymar has worked in online media since 2007.
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